Tag: publishing

For those of you that haven’t heard I threw an event with Bob Black at our local infoshop on August 7th 2015. At this event local activist “Morgan Le Fay” came to protest Bob for the 1995 Hogshire affair and ended up punching him a few times (3) in the face. A month later Bob announced on Facebook that I was both a traitor and enemy. He proceeded to blow my pseudonym (incorrectly) as an act of vengeance.

Rather than speaking about my own anger at Morgan or Bob at their behavior I am going to give the eulogy–one I’ve been contemplating for some time–of Bob.

I have known Bob, not in his daring years when I could have been a co-conspirator to his minor offenses against local legends Processed World, not when he was at the peak of his power and railed against work at the Gorilla Grotto, but perhaps in his decline, as publisher of his last two books. But the relationship between a publisher and an author is a close one. We could safely discuss his entire oeuvre at length and depth. We could discuss our shared ideological enemies. I could share with him my goal of returning his name back to being on the cynosure of anarchist thinkers where he belonged, returning him from his exile (for his naughty behavior against Jim Hogshire, etc.). As the preening narcissist he has always been, Bob basked in my appreciation, of someone he delusionally believed to be a fawning acolyte.

I still believe that Bob deserves defending, and my defense of him follows in three parts: he survived, he did something (even if it was the wrong thing), and he did it alone (for better and worse).

Survival

I imagine become an anarchist in the twilight period between the end of the Vietnam War era (not exactly a banner time for anarchists anyway) and the rise of (albiet low-profile) anarchist punks must have been quite lonely. I can’t imagine having these ideas without the benefit of seeing what impact they had on relationships as they were tested out. One of my clearest experiments of this sort was when I moved out of a group house (the very next day as I recall) when they wrote my name to an objectionable task on the chore wheel because I was at work. I had Debordian fantasies and put my body on the line in their pursuit. But I did not do it in a vacuum. The day I left the house I drove across the state to a warm, waiting room with friends who were happy to see me. The situation would have been miserable if I didn’t have those friends, that shared understanding about Debord, or the money to have a car to make that drive.

While Bob isn’t the only survivor of his generation I have a giant soft spot for all of them. Their clarity about then is one of the reasons that we can be fighting different fights now. Specifically I am referring to the context of anarchism, workerism, the left, and ATR. I have so much respect for this generation because I caught the tail end of the Red anarchist menace and its mediocrity was asphyxiating. As an ex-post-left anarchist I’ve had enough talk of what the left should be (if only…) to last three lifetimes. Dodging the bullet of having to endure Great-Men-Talking-about-Revolution-as-if-it-were-about-to-happen (or already did) I still consider quite the achievement, which would not have been possible if it were not for the ones who survived and particularly for Bob Black.

But they paid a price. In Bob’s case an ass-kicking or two, for others it was different kinds of social exclusions, ones that reflected their personalities and survival skills. On another level they paid the price of loss of faith. Obviously we are talking about a secular kind of faith–a belief that when exposed to a correct analysis or critique people will change their minds–but a faith nonetheless. A faith that other people, strangers, are like you: reasonable, argumentative, and more interested in something-like-truth than in popularity contests or petty games. This loss of faith has created grumpy, lonely men but it has also created a neon colored sign post for us, the next generation, and for those who are arriving after us.

Doing something

I realize that most of the anarchists of the post-left generation have exposed their own influences as being egoist but that wasn’t my perception of them or their position(s) during my first decade of exposure to them (prior to meeting them). It seemed to me that Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed was the American wing of a post-situationist perspective, full stop. In hindsight, I realize how little I knew but it was the SI that excited me when I was just an anarcho-tot. It was their practice of critique-as-action that made sense to me, and it was how I saw action that I wanted to participate in. The SI critique of what we would now call activism felt complete to me and, as a result, held no interest, it was complete. The attacks against groups and people of the same fighting weight did, and still does, hold me captivated.

This is where my defense of Bob is strongest. Whether in the name of revenge or his own sense of rightousness Bob devoted his life to fighting people and institutions outside of his weight class. We once had a conversation where I was expressing how not-in-a-hurry I was with regard to dealing with a slight because I held that the long view, the strategic view, would win out against hurried action. Bob made it clear that while he might have agreed with me about the likelihood of winning, my attitude was bullshit. The only time to deal with opponents is now. He meant it. He would rather lose the fight, and do it now, than wait and win.

This charming personality trait explains nearly every scandal and misstep Bob ever took. As he aged, his rush to fight took on the long form essay rather than the flaming poop bag, but the will to fight never waned.

This point, by the way, is why the activist insult against theory/critique people has always aggravated me. I try to give the activist crowd the benefit of the doubt that they do truly believe in the political practice they are part of “in the streets” and are not just using regular people as cover for their desire to see the glittering rain of a window pane. (The least they can do is realize that a vigorous internal conversation is a verb and not “doing nothing” but whatever.)

Bob has taught anarchism a lesson that has yet to be meaningfully followed up. We need to establish something like a set of rules, or a kind of terrain, around how to fight with one another. When Bob accused Ramsey, in the letter section of AJODA, of being a state agent (on the flimsey grounds that they needed to evade the consequences of the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1901), there were two results . One, Bob broke an unspoken rule against snitch-jacketing and two, Ramsey took him (and the accusation) extremeley seriously. Ramsey placed a fatwa against that issue of the magazine (#65, which had quite of few strong articles) and did whatever he could do persuade us (including by threat of force) and whomever was in his sphere of influence (which mostly meant infoshops that inclined Red) to not carry it. By putting his (and by extension ours–as AJODA did the material suffering, since AK Press stopped distributing the magazine after this issue) body on the line, Bob proved an unintended point. He provided Ramsey an opportunity to show what Ramsey was all about and Ramsey’s response to that paragraph of text couldn’t have been clearer.

For those of us who are similarly inclined, this lesson should be instructive. When you throw your body, identity, and personhood into the fray you rarely get accolades or huzzahs. At best you get a clarifying moment on a tangential point related to but not necessarily central to why you were acting in the first place. What most people do with this information is hide themselves behind nicknames, anonymity, or silence, and we, as a politic and practice, suffer for it.

The power of one

Bob has never had an ally (or accomplice in the modern vernacular) as he made it structurally impossible for anybody to be (or become) one. There are many private examples of how this looked in practice but it’s an obvious point that if you are fighting for your interpretation of the singular right and correct position anyone who would join you has to convince you that they think the same way that you do and for the same reasons.

Bob’s life is a series of breaks from limited collaborations that is not disconnected from the Stirnerite postulation about organization only lasting as long as the participants in it gain satisfaction in that arrangement. Bob’s innovation, if it could be called that, was to (mostly) set fire to any possibility of future collaboration by way of personal insults and public declarations of acrimony. Let’s call this practice “angry egoism,” which can only be ameliorated by its target bending knee, thereby placing future collaboration on the unstable base of an explicit power-over relationship.

And these dysfunctions ultimately rise from the fact that every battle, every idea, and every break happened for Bob alone. He has had lovers and temporary friends but largely his life was one lived alone, with no voice cautioning consequences or suggesting a different pacing, no daily consultations in bed. The only voice in his head was his, amplified by a Debordesque diet of spirits.

By this cautionary tale I put Bob Black to rest. He was a clarifying influence in my life, largely as a negative example but also as a good writer, but one incapable of reaching the heights he reached for. He will be remembered as much for who he wasn’t as for who he wanted to be but this is the most anarchist of problems. Most of us will not be remembered at all as our shared Beautiful Idea is larger than each of us and continues on after we are gone. The best we can hope for is some contribution to that idea and as a person who lived and wrote in especially challenging times and circumstances Bob Black has done his part.

Have you ever made a mind map? What is the difference between a project (in the project management sense of the word) and a project (in the anarchist sense of the word)? What is marketing? Is Dragon Naturally Speaking software a good investment? These questions, and many more, fill my days.

Not exactly what one would anticipate anarchist publishing to entail but by-and-large my responsibility for LBC Books (the publishing arm of Little Black Cart) is to make sure that it continues to be viable into the future. This means making sure it has a book to publish this month (and every month) and that we can afford to do so. It also entails thinking about the big picture a lot. Too much. (Is the publishing industry dying? Is the small press doomed? Does publishing to a very small niche increase or decrease our viability in the long term?) Consider me plagued with questions that have no answers. But here are some experiments that are developed enough to report on.

Imprints

Among the big questions of publishing is one around quality, quantity, and audience. Who are we writing (publishing) for and what are we trying to say to them? Are we doing it best when we say it once, slowly and completely, or in a dozen different ways with as many different approaches as possible? What about the fact that the things we say aren’t heard because we are using print/books to say them? What compromises are we willing to make, or interested in making, to be heard by new/more people?

Related to this big problem is the additional quirk that almost every radical position is occupied by a set of people who have somehow come to their position in the understanding that it is the only correct position to have. As ridiculous as this claim may be… it makes working closely with other people difficult.

Our solution for this issue has been the creation of a vibrant set of imprints. Rather than use our first and most prolific publishing imprint (or brand)–Ardent Press–to publish all of our books we only use it to publish material that fits certain conditions. For our other content we use different imprints. Our in-house imprints include LBCBooks, Ardent Press, Pistols Drawn, and Repartee. Each of these imprints has a different motivation.

We can now collaborate with (editorially) experienced individuals and groups so as to make their projects happen without having to negotiate with them on the values that we would find relevant if the project were on our own in-house imprint. This means that we spend less time arguing about editorial details that, while important to us, aren’t necessarily important to the people we’d like to collaborate with. Isn’t necessary to produce something interesting and worth existing but impossible by most real world practicality measures. Collaboration becomes a meaningful, and perhaps appropriately limited, form of interaction.

The downside to this strategy is that while we do measure ourselves to the task of publishing a book a month (our 24th in two years will be titled “I saw Fire”) the perception may be that we do much less because our branding doesn’t reflect our participation.

Iterative Publishing

One of the more depressing moments in publishing came when we received a pallet of Enemies of Society only to determine that we had messed up the Table of Contents (something incredibly easy to do). A part of your mind just wants to say “scrap them!” to all one thousand copies. Ridiculous, but a real urge when your mistake is of this magnitude.

However, most mistakes (especially like the Enemies one) are much larger in your imagination than they are in reality. While it is inconvenient for the content listings to be off by a few pages, if you are really looking for something you will find it.

I have found that mistakes like this one are mostly entertainment for the copy editor set (a category I have general respect for and fear of). These are the people who devote real time and energy to correcting the misspellings, typos, and homonyms that creep into any text. The CES include vicious variety, who will then proceed to inform the creators of this text that they are stupid, lazy, and sloppy. Often times the creators will believe them and feel bad. This lifecycle of the edit has existed since the printed word began (and is only in danger due to the total disrespect that the Internet has engendered to editing as a category).

When we determined that we would publish more, we also knew that our production cycle was going to be soul-crushing. So much content for so few people to review was going to kill people. We don’t want to kill people. Honest!

In my other life I work with computer systems. The project life-cycle problem is well-known and documented there. It’s also not a solved problem but that is a discussion for another time. Publishing books closely mirrors the waterfall model of software development. The criticisms of the waterfall process closely mirror those of publishing books:

Problems are not discovered until system testing.

Requirements must be fixed before the system is designed – requirements evolution makes the development method unstable.

Design and code work often turn up requirements inconsistencies, missing system components, and unexpected development needs.

System performance cannot be tested until the system is almost coded; undercapacity may be difficult to correct.

To put these problems differently (or more appropriate for the makers of books), books require a lot of time and money even before figuring out what is wrong with them. Correcting mistakes can be as resource intensive as starting from scratch. One does not know what they don’t know and by the time they do… they’ve already committed to the project.

Our solution is tentatively drawn from the same conceptual space as the world of software development. We call it iterative publishing and it basically means taking advantage of the fact that digital publishing is more flexible than printing press. The short version is that we can release a book into the wild, get feedback from the CES, roll that feedback into an improved book, and release the improved book as the (more-or-less) next book we print.

From a process point of view this solution hasn’t been a natural fit. To take a simple example, people outside of the land of software development don’t find sequential numbering of product to be natural. The world doesn’t find radicalbook.1.1.pdf to be the natural name after radicalbook.1.0.pdf errors out. This puts us in the uncomfortable situation of relying on timestamps rather than naming conventions. Aggravation all the way around.

However, it does allow us to avoid that horrible sinking feeling of a huge problem that will not disappear until the last book has left the building…

PRDM

If I were to be generous to consensus decision making I would say that it has morphed into such a globular and amorphous monster that it no longer has any of the specific problems that one tends to criticize it with. Most anyone who has worked with consensus has modified it, in some form, to make it usable for their context. Fair enough.

When I was younger and dumber I used to declare the deviations from consensus by (for instance AK) demonstrations of their deeper (non-anarchistic) motivations. I was wrong.

Consensus is a fairly new technic of the anarchist space. The idea that anarchistic decisions should be made in the way that is process-centric rather than product-centric makes sense in the post-68, or post-workerist, era. The connection between anarchist practice and daily life (as in the need to eat, work, live) has grown slimmer, as a result the need to make most decisions has decreased accordingly. As a result the actual process of making decisions can be seen as the goal, and practical aspect, of many anarchist groups. This is an innovation.

PRDM (proximal to resources decision making) is our early attempt at thinking about this problem differently. If consensus drives its momentum by an ideology of principles (Agreement Seeking, Collaborative, Cooperative, Egalitarian, Inclusive, Participatory), PRDM is driven by using the smallest unit necessary to appropriately make a decision. For LBC this looks like (as one example) a weekly meeting between as few as two but as many as four members of the distribution group and the print shop group to determine the workflow for the next week. The publishing (or outreach) group are not necessary for this meeting and are, therefore, not invited.

Our response to the “big circle” aspect of consensus is a series of Venn diagrams (only rarely calling on the big circle).

The spiritual motivation for consensus is as a way to frame a (religious, activist, or anarchist) project by a shared feeling of community. The opening circles, the twinkle fingers, the vibe of tolerance and acceptance are all parts of a set piece. Participation in consensus-based organizations is supposed to feel good, especially for outcasts and losers, and for the naive ones who believe that love and harmony are still meaningful labels to describe human activity. Consensus is a way to practice a humanistic spiritual practice that can be tolerated by the secular left.

PRDM should be framed as a scalpel used to dissect the humanism from decision making. (This is not to say that the two are entirely incommensurate but are conflated to such a degree as to practically be so.)

Final Words

It took me twenty years to develop the skills necessary to publish books. Obviously there might have been a number of shortcuts I could have taken to do this project, if I knew that this was where I was heading but it’s hard to imagine how I could have known ahead of time that this effort would feel so meaningful, even if mostly to me, without having put together the skills and people and then making some fucking books.

It took twenty years of reading and stumbling around before I had the capacity to make this experiment. This has given me a great deal of pause with regard to judging other people’s projects or their own stumbling efforts towards figuring out what their thing is going to be.

Similar to how I feel about non-monogamy (a practice I’ve participated in my entire adult life), I would not recommend my particular choices to anyone else BUT there is something about the effort that is absolutely worth distilling into a form others can utilize. I don’t know if it’s the desire to experiment with how one lives, or an insufferable pleasure in making embarrassing mistakes, but this is an infection I’m happy to share.

I* had an amazing year in 2012. So much so that the kind of perfectly normal winter induced funk that I seem to be in seems a little bit embarrassing. Here is a little bit about the year and a bit more about the future.

In 2011 I took a three month trip to Europe. Even though it was lonely and uncomfortable it was also life altering and inspiring. Prior to the trip I had been thinking more seriously about publishing. About how to do it in a more meaningful and affordable way and how to grow the umbrella project that a few of us were a part of. By about half way through the trip I had a pretty good idea what the plan was all that was left was implementation.

2012 was going to be a year about publishing. Publishing books. It took about 4 months to figure out what equipment to buy, how to use it, and what titles we were going to start the project with. By December 1st 2011 I knew that the first book we were going to put together was going to be by me and figured I knew what the first 3-4 titles of the year were.

In this write up I’m going to talk about the process of putting these books together, some nitty-gritty book production stuff, and perhaps wrap it up with some thoughts about why I feel more like a wrung out rag than a proud paterfamilias and why I go into 2013 with as more doubts than answers.

Here are the books we (LBC: Ardent, LBC Books, Repartee, GA, etc) will have officially publishing in 2012.

Fuck. I am not sure how much I want to go into these books (beyond what I’ve already done in this blog) but perhaps I’ll do more of a crit/self-crit for your all’s amusement.

What we did right

The model worked. The idea of publishing anarchist material frequently (a book a month) seemed a little ridiculous this time last year. We had no idea what we were doing three months into 2012 and half these titles weren’t even sparkles in our eyes. The idea that to be doing this meant increasing the pressure, of our own capacity, of our relationships, of our processes, etc, was the right one.

If our desire was to live anarchy, as a vibrant, challenging, set of ideas and people, then publishing anarchist material (propaganda, biographies, theory, and collections) is a real way to do it. I would be hard pressed to think of much anarchist material that I am interested in that didn’t pass through our lens this year. I often say that there are two different kinds of anarchists. There are the ones whose anarchism ended in 1937 and want to try again harder and anarchists who were born in 1968. If we are a publisher of the second kind of anarchy then this year demonstrated (to me at least) that there are legs on this. I can’t wait to see where they take us next.

We didn’t taken the ankle-biting criticisms too seriously. Obviously there are a variety of real/not-real things that can be said about some of our choices (paper, indexes, covers, etc) and some times at the moment they are uttered they can really get me down but by-and-large I feel pretty good about balancing the criticisms we have received in terms of their heat rather than their smoke.

We didn’t burn too many bridges. Given how nasty our little world is I can definitely say that we built 3-4 times as many bridges as we burned this year. This was perhaps due to some maturity on our part but it also due to the fact that our project is primarily about delivering other people’s messages to the world. The effort we are spending is making things that are not financially viable but are meaningful to us and an expression of our friends (or comrades, as the case may be) has finally paid off. Obviously we aren’t perfect and are kind of jerks… but I can finally say with no irony that the work speaks for itself.

What we did wrong

We rely far too much on the milieu. I love the milieu** but it is too closed of a circle. Even as that circle has expanded (thanks Occupy!) it demonstrates all the weaknesses of self-definition. There is a ton to criticize in “the scene” but for us, as a project, we have to start reaching outside of our comfort zone. As to how to do that in a meaningful and long-view way… Good question!

Too many men. I am increasingly concerned that our project, especially as a publisher of anarchist books, has become a sausage party. We only have two books (although there are two anon titles and one multi-author collection) that aren’t duderific. I think this issue is going to take years to truly resolve but that one of our first steps is to pull back and think about what our goal is. If the goal is to embrace and publish the world of anarchist ideas then books have a ton of embedded problems. I have a critic who often lambasts me for my (seeming) embrace of the long form essay (which the book is obviously an even longer form) as being out of touch with the attention span of the modern human. Even though the criticism is also a ridiculous one (since I’m also fairly married to the web short form) there is a big question that seems right to me. Money is not our motivation. If chaos, or anarchy-wearing-chaos-formalwear, is our motivation how can we better transmit this? Somewhere in the answer to this question is also the answer to dude question.

We did not take enough risks. Being that we are self-funded (aka broke) we are also kind of bullet-proof in a way that other publishers are not. While it would be possible for someone to sue me into financial oblivion, I owe so much more than I have that it would probably be harder on them than me. More importantly it wouldn’t stop us from publishing! As a result of this we can, and should, be taking more risks, doing more illegal and inappropriate publishing projects. This year we published Treatise (an affordable version of Revolution of Everyday Life) and Words (a send up of the IAS’s Lexicon series) but this barely scraped the surface of what we should be doing. There are priests to be strangled by beauracratic entrails…

What is next

Books of course! In addition there is going to be a push into video (long and short form), music (?!), deeper web content, e-books, etc. 2013 is going to be a bit more focused on reaching outside of our safe(ish) space and into the cold, hard world that doesn’t care one bit about what we are thinking about. Anti-politics for the masses and shit.

Financially we have to figure out a way for more people to participate in the project. It is strange to think that this makes any sense at all (in the quid pro quo sense of the word) but becoming an accomplice of LBC means getting everything that we do (something like 25-30 projects in 2012) and supporting the fact that we are doing it. If we could cover our burn (rate, the amount we have to spend a month) with our accomplices it would go a long way towards making the project more (personally) sustainable.

I guess related to income is how connected this project is to a rich and fulfilling emotional life. While intellectually I couldn’t be happier I find that emotionally devoting so many hours of my day (and life) to this thing is exhausting. I am exhausted. I am exhausted by the bad faith and criticism-that-isn’t. I am exhausted by the frenemies. I am exhausted by the fact that I have made these choices and have no one to blame but myself. I am exhausted by blaming myself. 2013 is the year where I figure out how to convert some of the intellectually fulfilling aspects of this crazy thing called anarchy into something healthy.

Maybe I’ll just go back to Europe or something.

* I want to apologize for the use of I throughout this article (and in general). Often times I personify the LBC project even though there are a half a dozen people who are also as committed to the project as I am. I do this for a variety of reasons but to list them… a desire to not be or seem representational, a desire to take responsibility rather than hide behind an institution, because I’m the only one who tends towards writing about the project at all, because marketing is about people, because I am alienated from my individual desires and only have project desire now, because I’m fucked up.

** Obviously it is love and hate but if love is a decision about who you want to live and die with… I’m still here.

It is a little thing, but of course I am proud
Falling under the category of “no good deed goes unpunished” the announcement of the new book was met with scorn and dismissal (although not by anyone who wanted me to know their name). The fascinating part of this, for me, was a new line of attack. Aragorn! is too powerful and should stop doing things. Giving this the full benefit of the doubt (which I don’t) this criticism is long overdue. Anarchists have become lazy. I don’t blame AK Press or Crimethinc for producing all the literature that deserves to be read but the attitude that because nothing we can do is good then we should do nothing at all. Obviously most everything I do…

Quick Sidebar: It is absolutely ridiculous for me to say that “I” do anything at all. I can think of 3-10 people (and one in particular) who I absolutely depend on for every public project I do. I say “I” mostly because I feel like I have prepared myself for the slings and arrows and want to honor my accomplices privacy and different capacities. Not everyone wants to be called out on the Internet, or in stupid email chains, or on forums, etc…

return: Most everything I do is bad. Is corrupted by capitalism, alienation, and editorial control. I’d like to say that the authorial control I try to give people is enough, but of course it isn’t. I wrestle with demons with clear motivation. I believe that an anarchy worth my time is one vibrant, powerful, and bottled with genie(s). I believe this thing is worth making my time worth something so I trudge on.

I am touched by corruption and blow it off because thinking in terms of the sacred and the unholy is exactly the Christian problem that makes life unlivable. I despise Christians and the forces of boring, boring, life. I want to fight them all but my (and our) weapons are dull and rusty. We anarchists have not risen to greatness and have no one to blame but ourselves.

The transformation of the world by the productive forces was bound slowly to realise the material conditions of total emancipation, having first passed through the stage of the bourgeoisie. Today, when automation and cybernetics applied in a human way would permit the construction of the dream of masters and slaves of all time, there only exists a socially shapeless magma which blends in each individual paltry portions of master and slave. Yet it is from this reign of equivalent values that then new masters, the masters without slaves, will emerge.

Personal Stuff: The slurring of my speech seems to be getting a bit worse. As some of you may remember I had a few brain aneurysms a few years ago which have mostly left me none-the-worse-for-wear but does seem to have impacted my speech. It usually only happens when I’m tired, or under-caffeinated, or feeling blah but this past week the issue has noticeably worsened. It seems to be impacted by my choice of words. Certain vowel combinations or word choices and my lazy tongue keels over.

It is easy to get troubled by this. Along with my typing hand this is my main output into the world. Without it I will be misunderstood or perhaps worst, ignored. It is a wonderful irony that just as I am finding a voice, in the publishing sense of the word, I might also be losing it.

This is the quote on the back cover of the book from “Anarchists Must Say What Only Anarchists Can Say”

It is not for anarchists to celebrate when The People tak over; anarchists ought not to be so amazed at examples of natural ingenuity and resilience. That is after all what they base all their principles on. Unfortunately their proper political task is less appealing and more controversial; it is to poke their fingers into the wounds of revolution, to doubt and to look for ways in which the Zapatistas, FLN, ANC or any other bunch of leftwing heroes will sell out, because they always do.

This simple statement probably sums up as well as I can why I wanted to publish this book. Today I held it in my hands for the first time and I am happy with it. It has heft. It is dark and moody. It is not a book that people should believe in but one that should shed some darkness on the places that my friends think are full of brightness.